New laptop transfer?

I just purchased a new laptop and would like some advice on transferring data games, videos, programs from old laptops hard drives to new laptop hard drive. any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

External drive? Flash drive?

 

I was kinda hoping to be able to transfer data in more a one step process maybe i will just install the hdd from old laptop into the second hdd slot on new laptop and transfer to primary drive on new laptop I think that should work???

 

That will ofcourse work. But, make sure you don't have virus or other kind of that stuff in ur hold HDD.

 

...You cannot transfer programs from one laptop to another. All the old programs on your old laptop are tied to the registry on the old laptop so that will not work.

If your videos are in your Documents and Settings (XP) or Users (Vista/7) you MUST change the owner and strip the permissions of the hard drive or you will not copy any data at all.

 

Each time I have done this, it was a manual process. If the old laptop was working, I simply used the network to copy the data across to the new one. For the times the old laptop was dead, I removed the drive, mounted it in an external case and did the copy.

Windows can automate this with it's migration utility. The time I tried it, it didn't work because of the versions involved. But, my boss did it recently moving from XP to Windows 7 with no problems. He did it over the network but I think it can be done via an external drive. I'm not sure exactly what it moved. I know it took his documents and some settings, but I don't know exactly what else. He did seem happy with it.

 

Most of the programs will work. Some will not. I have played a lot of games using this method back few years. But, I'll at one point suggest you to reinstall your programs. Things like antivirus etc. will not work.

 

Transferring content (documents, music, videos, etc) from one machine to another is relatively easy. Jsut find the files you want to transfer, and copy them over. The actual copy can take place over a network connection by using network shares, or can be done with external USB drives.

Transferring applications, games, programs, etc cannot be easily done. In most cases, there are many other components that get installed besides just simple files (e.g. entries in the Windows registry). Simply copying the directory where the program's files reside would not be enough, because you wouldn't get all of the extra components that got installed. The only way to reliably get applications, games, and programs onto a new machine is to re-install them from scratch.

 

No it is not. If the drive is NTFS it has permissions on the Documents and Settings folder (XP) / Users folder(